Tyranid Hive Fleet Question

[Darth Nostril]

Oh you're going to love it even better. In Space Marine, the Imperial Fists invade a dormant hive ship by... ramming straight up its space anus.

Oh fucking hell.
Thanks Connor, I'd managed to make myself forget that I'd ever read that book.
Until now.
Bastard.

[Shroom Man 777]

Eleventh Century Remnant, I have no idea what you just said. But I like it.

[Simon_Jester]

Lemme try to translate; I speak ECR-ese.

In the absence of outside- text, in the reality that all of this is entertainment which in it's purpose is basically the spin we use to modify our lives and make ourselves different people- I'll never agree with you on Jodorowsky. Having read most of the Incal and about half the Metabarons series' and seen fragments of his films, the magic and the madness comes to a worse place in the end than the mundanity he cries against- it's a different devouring god, that's all.

Still unmanned by the infinite, suppressed by the ineffable, made a pygmy in your own head by the things you cannot understand and a scumstain on your own soul by the greed with which you reach out to smear your own humanity across it- he's forgotten that the legends of the people he wants to base his vision on were hymns of unrelieved terror at the world around them, of begging and pleading to capricious, thirsting gods that you be eaten last.

The technocracy he claims to despise and that makes his art possible is not without good reasons to loathe it, but in the end they are human reasons that we can perhaps transcend, with humanity- his vision has only one escape from the infinitely small box of the mystic cosmos, and the mechanofuture is it.

Lemme see if I can grasp that...

Basically, it's a question about whether the universe is something bigger than human beings in which you're ultimately screwed for no reason other than being born human, or whether it's something human beings can explore and enliven and comprehend.

The problem with Jodorowsky's take on science fiction is that the surrealism and the mysticism all ends up boiling down to "life's a bitch, then you die." Ask any of the Metabarons. People are constantly being screwed over by the weirdness, and man's attempt to take control of his surroundings is utterly defeated by it.

Which is a shame, since in many ways the human story is the story of people trying to take control of their surroundings, rather than being a bunch of cavemen cowering from the lightning storms and worried about random bear attacks. There are of course corollaries to that, since when we achieve perfect control of our surroundings we may lose that ought to be at least mourned if not restored. But by and large, we are better off, happier and stronger and healthier and more capable of kindness to one another, in a society that does not constantly need to fear the whims of capricious surroundings.

When we look at science fiction, "in the reality that all this is entertainment... the spin we use to modify our lives and make ourselves different people..." there is a lot to be said for "the ships of NASA" and what they represent. Because they represent he idea that we can take control of our world and ourselves, rather than being leaves blown about in the winds of a capricious and potentially devouring surreality.

[Shroom Man 777]

I'm gonna disagree on that. In the respect of man taking control of his environment for the betterment of things and for making his own destiny is all good, but I think there's awesome to be had in encountering something that is great and majestic and can't be controlled or let alone comprehended - and this is the essence of the divine cosmic surrealistic stuff Jodorowsky loves. And it can be both beautiful, like a man swimming in a great coral reef seeing things great and small, precious anemones that man can just crush, and sharks swimming gracefully yet with the dangerous capability to kill the man if need be. Or it can be deadly, as Lovecraft's great and terrific creatures waking up and driving us mad and crushing us all carelessly and without even thinking of it.

We've seen so many depictions, all the time, of man prevailing and controlling and manufacturing his own destiny. So I find this take of man being but a microscopic grain of sand in a far vaster, far more beautiful tapestry spanning the cosmos a refreshing and wonderful perspective. Like walking out of a corridor in an entirely man-made and man-controlled subway, and suddenly stepping into a grand mountain range untouched by humanity and shaped by vast and ancient forces unknowable.



As for the ships of NASA goes. Why do we do all this, gather knowledge and make great technologies, if not to transcend our past preconceptions and build things that are beautiful and previously incomprehensible to our old selves? The ships of Foss and Giger are beautiful. When we go past functionality, when we don't need that anymore, and when we ourselves become or build the hummingbird vessels that sip the nectar of the stars - when we become one with the very magnificent forces that were once inconceivable and incomprehensible - then I think that would be the ultimate victory of man over nature, when man becomes nature. Now that's some zany religious stuff right there.

[Simon_Jester]

I think we need thesis-antithesis-synthesis on this one, someone break out the dialectic.

What it comes down to is whether all this incomprehensible transcendence is perceived as a creative or a destructive force, or as both.

If the answer is "creative," then yes it can fit in and be a positive and wonderful thing, and we look at it in awe and become more than we ever imagined by absorbing it and being absorbed into it, fine. And the idea that this is the nature of reality, that idea is where most of the positive consquences of human spirituality come from.

If the answer is "destructive," then you are left with a vision of a world that is ultimately bad in any human frame of reference, undesirable and unlivable, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Which is, in its way, an all-devouring machine worse than any technocracy, because at the very least anything humanity does to itself in a technocratic way, it does on human terms.

If the answer is "both," then you have something really weird and deep and possibly neither good nor bad, much as 'gravity' or 'nuclear fusion' are neither good nor bad, and I don't know what to say about it right now.

[Shroom Man 777]

Of course it is both. That's the whole point of it being incomprehensible. Of the coral reef being both beautiful and serene with the most colorful creatures, and then the riptide sucks you out into the open ocean to die or a gleaming chrome barracuda darts in and slits your throat with its serrated fangs. That's precisely why it is so awesome and so humbling and so magnificent and beautiful and terrifying. The rain wets the scorched land, gives moisture for the sproutling plants to subsist on, quenches the thirst of a dying man. Yet when the deluge comes, the flood will wipe out all the plants and the quenched man shall be drowned all the same. And these forces don't know and don't care and they may not necessarily be living or thinking, and if they are living and thinking, their processes are so alien and far and above us that we're but microbes to these great processes. They possess the fundamental power to create and destroy, and yet the process neither ends nor begins with either creation or destruction, and goes on and on. Can it be understood? Should it be understood? Is there even any understanding to be had? Yes? No? Maybe? The fact that we are made to behold these things that are greater than us, allows us to humbly ask these questions and perhaps answer them, or never find any answers at all. It's a zen koan on an existential level.

[Simon_Jester]

It's a tricky balance. Pushing the "cosmos contains big ineffable things" idea too far results in a world where the human spirit exists, not even to be humbled or awed, but just to be crushed. That is where Lovecraft took it. And as a way for us to look at ourselves and our lives through the lens of fiction, I totally get ECR's point that this is not the kind of fiction I would want much of. Because if you believe in your guts that the human spirit exists to be crushed by bigger and more glorious things, that human destiny is to be a chew-toy for these big glorious things, why come into contact with the big glorious things at all?

If you take it that far, there's no real incentive not to reject the unknown, which leads to the kind of narrow, pruned mentality you decry.

Push the idea too little, and there's nothing out there to see. The only image of the future that survives is a sort of mean-spirited present-writ-large. You get the same problem in the end.

Much of the best science fiction contains a balance between "It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross," and "But it's not for the timid." Yes, you run into things you can't understand and which should force a thinking person (or being in general) to stop and rethink themselves and their place in the universe. But if you make the fantastic and the mystic so turbulent and powerful that there is no stable niche, no way for the individual to forge some kind of worthwhile existence in the larger world and cosmos, then you lose much of the value of putting the fantastic and the mystic in there in the first place.

[Shroom Man 777]

I think the idea has been pushed too little, and too few wish to push past the boundaries of people's comfort zones. Which is why so many people's preconceptions are so stale, sterile and dour, unexciting and unimaginative. Of course I don't want all fiction or most fiction to be like what I said, with great implacable and incomprehensible beings and forces whose shadows eclipse us always. Just like how I don't want all the foods in my plate to be entirely spicy hot chilli concarnes. But the opposite extreme has happened, and nowadays the food on our figurative plate of fiction resembles the bland tasteless inoffensive gruels served at hospitals to old people with easily upsettable stomachs. The result of this is an agoraphobia of the imagination - where people become afraid, or hostile, or dismissive, or just refuse to imagine things greater than man, or greater than their preconceptions of what man is or should be (industrialization) - brought forth by a steady diet of only bland generic lime gelatins.

I wouldn't say that too much fiction of encountering great things is bad, either. Most of human history was with man dealing with forces he could barely understand. But man dealt with it with panache, it built his character, and he did not let things like having his ships sunk by typhoons or falling off the edge of the unknown world stop him.

And the interaction between man and the greater doesn't just have to be "man is humbled, and then he is crushed like a bug". It can always be "man is humbled, and now we see how man and men act in these strange new conditions with the great thing is looming in their background". It is not an inherently destructive man-crushing thing, although it can and often does crush man - like how great mountains often do kill people with avalanches and landslides and such. I don't think that we should think that it can only result in such. If all one can imagine is man being crushed by the cosmic things, then that also shows a limited or one-track imagination (in the case of Lovecraft, because he was a misanthropistic loon).

[Simon_Jester]

The result of this is an agoraphobia of the imagination - where people become afraid, or hostile, or dismissive, or just refuse to imagine things... greater than their preconceptions of what man is or should be (industrialization) - brought forth by a steady diet of only bland generic lime gelatins.

Now that is a significant thing and worth looking at, yah.

I wouldn't say that too much fiction of encountering great things is bad, either. Most of human history was with man dealing with forces he could barely understand. But man dealt with it with panache, it built his character, and he did not let things like having his ships sunk by typhoons or falling off the edge of the unknown world stop him.

Yes, this is good- I think a big part of what I'm getting at is that this panache is the hard part to replicate believably.

The original Star Trek was good for this. Captain Kirk did not let things like falling off the edge of the galaxy or running into godlike psychic beings stop him, even when both of those things happened in the same episode.

[Connor MacLeod]

Current sci fi trends as I have observed tend to move away from the 'exploration or wonder' angles like you used to get with Trek, and focus more on grimy, gritty, milwank stuff, or hard, precise 'mechanical' stuff (not just gigatons or kilojoules, but we're talking about the sort of stuff you see in Atomic Rockets.) And even the 'space fantasy' stuff is either entirely recycled (how many times have the REpublic and Empire alternately collapsed and risen again to be saved by a Skywalker, or a Skywalker turned to the Dark side and had to be defeated?) or it fails to keep any sort of interesting balance (40K's constant emphasis of doom, gloom gritty 'you're so fucked' type crap without anything to balance it out is entirely parody by now. It takes a decent author like Abnett or ADB to really pull off 40K's atmosphere without fucking it up. And I dont think I have to explain the flaws in Weber or Ringo...)

I really kinda miss stuff like Stargate (when it wasn't drowning in technobabble) or Farscape.

Oh and at least to stay vaguley on topic: We don't actually know much about the uses of the biomass they suck up. Ther'es been hints (or speculation) that much of it gets transported elsewhere for some other reason, and it woudlnt surprise me if their super-magical Tyranid metabolisms and healing/adaptive abilities require biomass to maintain or create it. WE do know they don't just strip biomass though, they take oceans, atmosphere, and even some rocks and metals (which seem to get incorporated into their skeleton and the chitin/carapace of their armor, more akin to the bionic/cybernetic enhancement you might get from the Imperium, just more 'organic-tech' style.)

[jollyreaper]

Love how this started with silly warhammer fluff dissection and went profound. Kudos all.

[jollyreaper]

Replying with ruminations. I find it really hard to put into words what I so intensely dislike about Jodo. My primary experience with him is his essay about the Dune movie he wanted to make, linked to on the first page of the thread.

I think my objection to him doesn't even stem so much from what he's trying to say but his offensively grandiose self-promotion. I'm flashing back to conversations I had with venture capitalists at failed companies listening to their ideas of how they're going to be launching these aggressive new bids while their current companies are falling to pieces. I don't know how much of this is genuine and how much is him playing the role of crazed auteur but if I had to spend any time in a room with him I do believe there would be violence. His son getting a fifteen day lecture from some martial arts master? Divinity speaking to him and telling him the art to make? That flashes me back to childhood and spending time around churches. The presumption that God or the supernatural is on a first name basis with you and is having a chat. Ugh.

As for his view of what to do with Dune, if you're going to change the story around that much, why even make it be Dune? Nobody objects when someone makes a brand new work with the inspirations clearly visible. It's understood that new art builds upon old art. But why name something an adaptation when you're just going to change it into something that clearly isn't? And more to the point, what he's saying doesn't make any sense even when explained. I doubt it would even be that clear if put on film.

Religion is all about man trying to put a human concept on the incomprehensible and unknowable. In the past, everything was unknown. We didn't even have a firm grasp on where babies came from, let alone thunder, the stars, how the seasons worked, etc. We made up shit because we'd rather have a bad explanation than nothing at all. So now those of us who aren't ICP know how fucking magnets work, those of us who aren't Bill O'Reilly can explain the tides, we can explain the sun and the stars and how the Earth formed. We're still hazy on the really big questions. What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What comes after death? Any honest atheist will admit that we're as much lacking for proof that nothing comes next as any religionist is lacking for proof that something does. But for the world we live in, cause precedes effect. There is an explanation for everything. There is no magic, no "other way of knowing." This is deeply unsatisfying for people who want a metaphysical security blanket.

I wouldn't say that too much fiction of encountering great things is bad, either. Most of human history was with man dealing with forces he could barely understand. But man dealt with it with panache, it built his character, and he did not let things like having his ships sunk by typhoons or falling off the edge of the unknown world stop him.

And the interaction between man and the greater doesn't just have to be "man is humbled, and then he is crushed like a bug". It can always be "man is humbled, and now we see how man and men act in these strange new conditions with the great thing is looming in their background". It is not an inherently destructive man-crushing thing, although it can and often does crush man - like how great mountains often do kill people with avalanches and landslides and such. I don't think that we should think that it can only result in such. If all one can imagine is man being crushed by the cosmic things, then that also shows a limited or one-track imagination (in the case of Lovecraft, because he was a misanthropistic loon).

I'm sure there's a term for it but I think of it as "Man as shit stain." Got my fill of that in church with man being incapable of doing anything good without God and how all failures and evil in the world come back to a lack of proper terror at being sinners in the hands of a vengeful God. But you get exactly the same stuff from secular scifi. Golden age tropes about "Gee, aren't humans neat?" gave way to "We're viruses with shoes." Of course, that goes hand in hand with an appreciation of how we're completely fucking up the natural world and how so many of our problems aren't imposed from outside (famine, flood, quakes, etc) but are political in nature. We're shits who can't play nice with others.

I'd like to see a return of more aspirational scifi. We become better than who we are because we're sick of being satisfied with our usual pattern of failure. Mystics like Jabo focus on the evils of technology (and yeah, there are many) but he misses the point and throws out the baby with the bath water. Technology doesn't have to be dehumanizing. Technology doesn't have to ruin quality of life. We have to man up and use it responsibly. We can't blame the technology of television for what's on TV. That's a human failing and one within our power to correct.

And as an offering to the theme of cosmic horror, I submit a highly NSFW music video. Kids break into a pool for a little skinnydipping and detour past the twilight zone and straight into insanity and death beneath an alien sky.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xlnz3u ... erin_music

[Shroom Man 777]

Why do you assume that when man encounters something greater and huge and incomprehensible, that he is immediately relegated into shit? Why does "God" have to be vengeful? Why can't we be relegated into... tiny assymetrical pieces of... oglolami? Why can't "God" be stupendously duodendanulous? And those two words aren't even real words, I have no idea what they even mean, and maybe it will take us one hundred thousand years of pondering on a Buddhist temple planet orbiting an obsidian dwarf star while inhaling neutronium fumes from scintillating diamantine hookah/prayer wheels to comprehend what those two words mean. And the stupendously duodendanulous God won't even be vengeful towards us. He'll be more interested in interpreting the runic inscriptions inscribed on the surface of that obsidian dwarf star which was left behind to him by his bygone ancestors, who were even more stupendously duodendanulous than he was, and now he is on a quest to attain perfect harmonious duodendanulousity to honor their memory.

Maybe the runes on the obsidian dwarf star will tell him to come to us, and he will ask us - in our humble assymetrical oglolaminess - to aid him. And then we will join him on a spirit quest beyond the nine vectors of the known and unknown universe, venturing into the depths of the Andromedan Qaddaths doing God knows what. Except, even the God whose shoulder we are perched on has no fucking clue what this is gonna be all about. Maybe when we are confronted by the ultimate question, our neutronium fume-infused kung fu will help the God find the answer. Or maybe not.

One of the points of science fiction is in encountering unknown things that stretch imagination and creativity and do not conform to our expectations or our ideas of what should or shouldn't be. If I go touristing to another country, I'm not gonna visit fastfood places that I'm comfortable with. I'm going to go to strange new places that I've never been to before, I'm going to do things that people in that country do which I've never done in my own country, weird ass bizarre stuff that I might not even know existed.

Similarly, if we're going on a tourist trip into the realm of the imagination, of the impossible, of the inconceivable and the infinite - then yes, I am going to want to encounter strange huge things that will make me feel small. And I won't scream or be hostile or frightened or feel like shit. Well, maybe I will be frightened. Oh, hell yeah, there'll be lots of "holy shit" going on. But, come on. That's the point. This is why we launch ourselves in space ships. This is why we have giant telescopes. We want to see these things, and sometimes - lots of times - we might not understand what we're seeing (maybe later we will figure it out, maybe we won't), but it's going to be a great and fantastic time. And the further away the things we encounter get from the human reference point, the weirder and stranger they get, then the better it's going to be.



Also, you've mixed up Jodo's ramblings on the divine with your ideas on poopy Judeo-Christian religulons. What if that's not the kind of divine he's talking about, not the anthropomorphic vengeful Yahweh thing? What if he's rambling about something more Buddhistic or Taoistic or something else entirely?

[jollyreaper]

Regardless of whether it's ancient astronauts or healing crystals or Jesus, woo is woo. Jodo is all about the woo.

As for greater than ourselves stuff, I'm a fan. I love that stuff. What I was saying is that it's small-minded to retreat from it. My favorite Lovecraft story is Mountains of Madness and I liked how the protagonist came to feel a kinship with the Elder Things, despite differing origins and evolutionary lineages, those creatures had curiosity and daring and were men.

Jodo doesn't have any kind of coherent thesis and it isn't even a satisfying sort of magic. It's nonsense crap no different from bad writing.

[Rabid]

When I read the Meta-Barons, or other comic books from Jodorowsky/Moebius, I must confess I am more interested by the graphical surrealism than by the plot itself, which seems non-sensical most of the time ; even if on second analysis it convey recurrent thematic like the quest of self and the search for humanity (in the Meta-Barons and the Incal at least).

It is the surrealism, the “madness” (a close-but-inappropriate term in this case) they convey that render them interesting in my eyes. It force the reader to let his spirit “break” from the limits it has imposed on itself and to let it wonder off in places it would never have gone to on its own (RE : The Meta-Barons : A cosmic louse the size of a galaxy ? Seriously ?!).
It is quite an interesting experience, to be honest, even if most of the time you are left to wonder “what the fuck did I just read ?”. Exactly like with Shroom most of the time, thinking of it...


- - - - - - - -

To slightly derive the conversation, there's a thematic I “discovered” with the CthuluTech universe (or more exactly EarthScorpion's Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, 'cause vanilla CthuluTech is pretty dumb when you think about it) is that Man, confronted to the Unknown and Incomprehensible, is forced to evolve, to adapt in order to survive, and that at the end of the Journey, we finally become what we once feared (even if maybe we don't realize it).

In short, the process by which Man BECOME “Cthulu”, “The Great Unknown”, “That Which Lies Beyond The Stars”.

As a theme I think it has a lot of potential. It's just hard not to fall into certain traps and ending with a simplistic "morale" than ruins everything.

[Shroom Man 777]

Regardless of whether it's ancient astronauts or healing crystals or Jesus, woo is woo. Jodo is all about the woo.

What happens if that Jesus came down from the ether and is revealed to be an androgynous albino hermaphrodite technomage who can shapeshift into an organic ornithopter to take you on a surreal dream quest to interpret the ancient inscriptions marking the dwarf stars, which are revealed to be a constellation of prayer beads for a Buddha Palm the size of a subsector?

I don't mind the woo, especially when it can take us into places that aren't the usual dour boring MAREENS in SPESS. Would you prefer yet another representative democracy in space, populated by Americans in space, with more presidents in space, with more soldiers in space, and with ANOTHER war versus even more dour cliche'd space bug alienoids? Maybe some more assault rifle railguns, generic dropships, future tanks, drill sergeants going HUT HUT HUT, rank insignias, and orbital drop paratroopers...in space.

Alright. I suppose things like intangible energy fields permeating the galaxy and one harnessing it with clarity of mind and thought, meditation, and venturing into caves that have inside them nothing except what you take with you, and all that jazz is "woo". I guess you'd like to have midichlorians instead.


[This isn't just about Jodo anyway. It's about some of the things he touches on, but it's not specific to him and him only.]

[jollyreaper]

Regardless of whether it's ancient astronauts or healing crystals or Jesus, woo is woo. Jodo is all about the woo.

What happens if that Jesus came down from the ether and is revealed to be an androgynous albino hermaphrodite technomage who can shapeshift into an organic ornithopter to take you on a surreal dream quest to interpret the ancient inscriptions marking the dwarf stars, which are revealed to be a constellation of prayer beads for a Buddha Palm the size of a subsector?

Then that goes from the realm of theological speculation to established fact. In the "His Dark Materials" trilogy science and the supernatural are both realms of religious inquiry and the Church supervises research in experimental theology. And in that setting there is a "god" in the Christian sense known as the Authority but rebels openly question whether he can truly claim to be the author of all Creation. Borrows a bit of the whole gnostic question with the Demiurge.

I don't mind the woo, especially when it can take us into places that aren't the usual dour boring MAREENS in SPESS. Would you prefer yet another representative democracy in space, populated by Americans in space, with more presidents in space, with more soldiers in space, and with ANOTHER war versus even more dour cliche'd space bug alienoids? Maybe some more assault rifle railguns, generic dropships, future tanks, drill sergeants going HUT HUT HUT, rank insignias, and orbital drop paratroopers...in space.

Oh, I certainly agree that the old tropes can get boring. I'm actually quite biased in favor of doing something different just so we can see something new. But different doesn't always mean good. It still has to be done well to be good.

Alright. I suppose things like intangible energy fields permeating the galaxy and one harnessing it with clarity of mind and thought, meditation, and venturing into caves that have inside them nothing except what you take with you, and all that jazz is "woo". I guess you'd like to have midichlorians instead.

Take that back! Take that back! lol

My bias is that stories have to make sense and have dramatic weight, regardless of whether they're in the real world or a fantasy world. And established rules really need to be followed or the whole thing seems like an wasted exercise. Star Trek operated on magic and the rules would change from show to show so there was no sense of drama to any of the situations. Transporters would work one week and not the next, the shields can do this but now can't do that. It's the same frustration you get with comic books where Superman can do battle with a godlike metahuman one week and get his ass kicked by a mobster the next. (But the mobster has green kryptonite!)

Going back to the Star Wars example, it's pretty clear that there are practical limits to what can be accomplished with the Force. Yoda says he can move a mountain with the Force but it's pretty clear that just moving one starfighter tuckered him out. If we took his statement at face value, Ben Kenobi could have made the Death Star blip out the moment he realized it wasn't a moon. Luke could have done the same over Endor. But that would make for terrible drama.

That Force Unleashed game ruined the lore and basically turned the whole thing into Dragonball Z. Completely got the scale of Jedi powers off. And that ruins the drama because Jedis are now pretty much impervious to any kind of danger posed by mere mortals. Removes it from the human scale.

[This isn't just about Jodo anyway. It's about some of the things he touches on, but it's not specific to him and him only.][/quote]

Here's my take on magic in the real world. It exists inside the human head. A shaman can't really do a little dance and make it rain. But if he can convince people he has that power, he can get them to do all sorts of things that would have anyone outside the group just shaking their heads. Cult of personality, power of belief, it goes beyond any sort of rational explanation. It's still pretty much within the field of psychology and a behaviorist might be able to tell you what's going on in their heads but it's still hard to explain. It's like when a guy dresses up in a santa suit and slaughters his family, you might be able to point to an acrimonious divorce and money problems but that still seems inadequate to explain the situation.

Now for sheer force of will, someone able to cut off his pinned arm and tie off the stump and make it back to civilization, that goes beyond our ability to comprehend. Someone who sees their family die in front of them but has the strength to go on living, wow. Someone who goes through the Holocaust and maintains a shred of sanity, wow. This is strength of the human spirit, inner motivation stuff that is hard to comprehend even when we see the proof of it. It's impossible to even try to reason through these things.

On the other hand, groundless faith is annoying, especially when it's used as a tool in storytelling like the power of belief making some external possibility happen. If you look at Lord of the Rings, I can buy magic in that setting and dragons and wizards but the thing that's irksome is the final battle before the gates of Mordor basically boiled own to Strider saying "We just gotta have faith in the hobbitses." Now maybe he was thinking "we've got a 100% chance of doom if we just sit here and fortify Minas Tirith and we've got a 99.9% chance of dying if we march on Mordor and the hobbits are by some chance still alive." But it's not exactly a model on how to fight and win wars.

I guess one way to put it is the difference between whoa and woo. Whoa is something that gives you a spiritual pause and makes you think. Woo is just a bunch of empty nonsense.


This right here is a whoa for me.

The idea that we went from cavemen at the mercy of cruel nature to science and technology and reshaping the world is a major whoa. The idea that we can go from strongman authoritarian systems to democracies where the individual has a political voice, that's a whoa. I can see the argument that pure application of science can strip the enjoyment from life the same way that you can live on bland, nutrient gruel and be healthy but it's not as enjoyable and satisfying as having a mixed diet. There's a lot to be said for the warnings of tech dystopias. But our pre-scientific world was no utopia, either. And the sense I get from Jodo is that he's not about whoa, just about woo.

I don't know if I'm making any sense here.

[Shroom Man 777]

You're making perfect sense. My own sense of Jodo, and not just him but the like as well, is that the woo is merely part of the decoration of the whoa, and I consider the mystic terms in describing the whoa - which is what came off to you as woo - as heavy poetic and artistic license. It's something I'm okay with. Instead of some redshirt with a quadrucorder describing the whoa-thing as a "quantum vortex flux wave recalibrating the oscilloscopotron of our tachyonic subspace neutrono techno-technos" or something sensible, it's instead "the orgone energy of the pan-galactic superego ebbs and flows through the tides of time and space, and only through calisthenic meditation can we center ourselves to perceive the divine electrons adrift in those cosmic waves". If the whoa is truly outside the norms of human perception and preconception, then if the descriptions of it are also outside the norms of sensibility and sanity, then I'm okay with that too. It adds further flavor to the meal. Sure, some may taste it and spit it out in disgust, but hey.

It's like how freeverse poetry doesn't have to conform to iambic pentagramometers anymore, except this is freeverse storytelling and imaginationing. You're free to totally hate it forever though, and part of the charm of some works (like Jodo) is that as many people as there are who are entertained and awed by it, there's the same number of folks traumatized or incensed or compelled to hate the Jodonizer and co. forever. The more condemnations and fatwas it gets, the better.


[You'll also notice that a lot of my previous posts involved evoking imageries of mountain ranges, coral reefs, and vistas and sceneries of great and beautiful things. So we're coming off from the same page as your whale.]

[jollyreaper]

I like what you're saying. I think part of what gets me is the babble. I hated trek's techno-babble because the problem came from babble and is resolved by babble and is just a bunch of nonsense. Nothing actually holds up because they aren't even talking real science to begin with.

Mythno-babble is annoying because people seem to take it seriously. I can accept the Force and dragons equally but the hardcore woo types take the Mythno-babble seriously and that it's not just part of a pleasing fairy tale. It's like trying to separate practical lessons on fitness and defense from the woo associated with martial arts. Or you get people who see through the woo of their own culture but then run off to embrace something foreign and exotic that's just another form of woo.

As a tangential example, I like zombie movies but hate it when they try to explain it with science. No, you can't, don't try. Leave the reanimation of the dead unexplained. Only invoke enough science to show how the people in the know are even more horrified than laymen because they know how impossible the situation is. They're now in the twilight zone and rational explanations are the first casualties. "I spit in the face of reason" is scary. Trying to call it a virus just makes me say "oh well that can't possibly be because..."

To bring this back to the original topic, I think tyranids work better when much of the explanation is left to warp magic. The whole warhammer universe runs by rule of cool anyway. You could just as easily say the whole universe as we know it lies within the simulation spaces of a great chaos god and so everything we see operates by consensual hallucination. Wizards and psykers are just lucid dreamers who can reshape the memescape.


Incidentally, the lack of having a coherent idea is what annoys me about so much j-horror. They come up with really outré ideas but then just throw them on the screen and leave nothing explained. One could argue they make demands of the audience or one could argue they're just lazy. Suicide Club was
Incredibly frustrating that way.

[Shroom Man 777]

My greatest experience with j-horror was Frankenstein Girl versus Vampire Girl. So yeah.

I'm just looking for the wonderful and the amazing, and things that go outside the norms and conventions of things. I totally don't take any of the mytho-babble seriously, I think it's just a load of artistic and poetic licensure, so yeah, I find myself entertained by it and I think it has a charm to its own. I just want folks to push the envelope and just make incredible things.

Hence Dyson Sphere coral reefs and clamshell organic aircraft carrier flight decks the size of planetoids, interdimensional subspace intestine stomach organ regurgitation, superstring disintegration gastric juice external digestion puking, and all those crazy ass suggestions. Organic tech. It shouldn't just be a bunch of hydragauntlinglisks clawing your face off, though that is pretty cool. It's obvious that Tyrannidoid organic tech is nothing like the organic biologies real living creatures use, but is something much more - and because we're dealing with a fantastic verse of cathedral warships cracking continents, we might as well have all the weird ass bullshit I postulated for the pure insanity of it. They can shit out hyper-compressed dark matter.

Yes. A Tyrannidoid super-mega-organoid bioform ship shits out dark matter from its trans-singularity sphincters. And, like, it takes a combined Ordos Xenos Inquisition team, an AdMech technotheological explorator choir, and a Deathwatch Space Marine squad, on a deep cover behind the enemy lines to recover a stool sample of dark matter shits. Extremely volatile and lethal and exotic. And they're doing this in the middle of Tyrannid space, near the nebula grazing fields of Tyrannid non-combat organoforms.

You have the Imperium's best and brightest extracting Nid shits. And through this grave awesome badass mission, they can examine the dark matter pooops and discover the true principles in its creation - Tyrannid astro-bioform digestion, the process in which they digest the minerals and vespene gasses and pylons to produce their awesome powers. And so they gain greater understandings of the Nids and, like, knowledge is power and knowing is half the power. And you can imagine AdMech technopriests going through litanies and dousing their speculums in holy oils and them reciting prayers while probing the shit out of that piece of Tyrannid dark matter exotic neutronium shits.

Yes.

[Simon_Jester]

Shroom, you stole the dark matter shit idea from Futurama.

My bias is that stories have to make sense and have dramatic weight, regardless of whether they're in the real world or a fantasy world. And established rules really need to be followed or the whole thing seems like an wasted exercise. Star Trek operated on magic and the rules would change from show to show so there was no sense of drama to any of the situations. Transporters would work one week and not the next, the shields can do this but now can't do that. It's the same frustration you get with comic books where Superman can do battle with a godlike metahuman one week and get his ass kicked by a mobster the next. (But the mobster has green kryptonite!)

Me, I disagree. Most of the Trek episodes I've seen were quite good at preserving dramatic tension (mostly from the old series, granted). Indeed, the reasons why devices like transporters and shields function inconsistently in Trek is often because the writers cared more about making each issue dramatic and having some kind of conflict that the viewer will want to watch than they do about technical consistency.

Spock and a shuttle crew being stranded on the surface of a planet makes an interesting story, but requires that the transporters be out of commission... so boom, transporters are out of commission and the episode winds up being genuinely likeable.

Is that not drama?

This can be done wrong or irresponsibly or carelessly, but I don't think you can say that inconsistent portrayal of technology makes the drama bad.

That Force Unleashed game ruined the lore and basically turned the whole thing into Dragonball Z. Completely got the scale of Jedi powers off. And that ruins the drama because Jedis are now pretty much impervious to any kind of danger posed by mere mortals. Removes it from the human scale.

I feel free to ignore that game- and not because of canon policies, but because it makes bad art. I don't think I'm under an obligation to consider one isolated piece of fiction in the Star Wars setting "true" if it spoils all the rest.

On the other hand, groundless faith is annoying, especially when it's used as a tool in storytelling like the power of belief making some external possibility happen. If you look at Lord of the Rings, I can buy magic in that setting and dragons and wizards but the thing that's irksome is the final battle before the gates of Mordor basically boiled own to Strider saying "We just gotta have faith in the hobbitses." Now maybe he was thinking "we've got a 100% chance of doom if we just sit here and fortify Minas Tirith and we've got a 99.9% chance of dying if we march on Mordor and the hobbits are by some chance still alive." But it's not exactly a model on how to fight and win wars.

This is, I think, fundamentally a mis-take on the way Lord of the Rings is written. Tolkein explicitly set out to write mythology, and the resulting story had mythic qualities and plot conventions. It is no more a "model of how to fight and win wars" than the Iliad is; if Tolkein had wanted to write a manual on how to win wars he'd have included references to Clausewitz and Liddell-Hart.

Indeed, if anything the point is that evil is not something which you can banish and destroy by clever manipulation of armies- that even if you could take upon yourself the power to do so, you would tend to become that which you fought. Tolkein's point about the Lord of the Rings NOT being a fantasy version of World War Two comes into play here- he once remarked that if it had been, Saruman would have switched sides in mid-war, the secret of ring-making would spread, the postwar world would be one dominated by a Cold War between ring-equipped Minas Tirith and Isengard, and the hobbits would wind up crushed or enslaved by one or both sides.

Which is a harder, colder, crueler version of the setting, and in my opinion an inferior one... and yet in some ways that "force triumphs over the absence of force" mindset is what has come to dominate science fiction and fantasy since then.

It's like how freeverse poetry doesn't have to conform to iambic pentagramometers anymore, except this is freeverse storytelling and imaginationing. You're free to totally hate it forever though, and part of the charm of some works (like Jodo) is that as many people as there are who are entertained and awed by it, there's the same number of folks traumatized or incensed or compelled to hate the Jodonizer and co. forever. The more condemnations and fatwas it gets, the better.

Myself, I just tend to ignore the Jodonizer; his stuff is so full of weird that it doesn't feel worthwhile to get at the underlying value. That's another peril of being too weird- one which you've probably run into at a smaller scale on this site. Cast the claim (the thesis, the argument, the idea, whatever) in strange and imagery-laden enough terms, cant it in analogy and punning and so on, and eventually it becomes impossible to understand, and people stop trying.

The audience is only human.

[Shroom Man 777]

Shroom, you stole the dark matter shit idea from Futurama.

Yes, but the hilarious bit is that the AdMech and so forth can go through all sorts of ordeals and odysseys just to obtain what amounts to Nid Shit, and that Nid Shit will actually reveal to them all sorts of weird ass details on the Nids and their weird asses.

It's like after eating Pluto, Superman shits out Star Destroyers, but the Silver Surfer being not as strong only managing to shit out Enterprises, and both their shits end up having a versus duel of shit.

Hmmm... maybe other bioform organisms eat the darkmatter Nid shit. Its compressed matterness and neutroniumness might be digested further by other organisms into armor. Or, not even digested. Great crab-like artisans with molecular furnace-claws could melt these matters and sculpt them over the raw skin of other bioforms, a bit like hammering the horseshoes on a horse's hooves. These Nid Shits could merely be the processed products of what amounts to a giant refinery factory, in bioform form. That also fits into the whole "Nid Hive Fleets are just fire army termite ants eating stuff to bring back home", because a mechanical equivalent of that would be trucks bringing raw materials to a factory, and that factory processing it, and the processed products being distributed to other facilities to do as they please.

Myself, I just tend to ignore the Jodonizer; his stuff is so full of weird that it doesn't feel worthwhile to get at the underlying value. That's another peril of being too weird- one which you've probably run into at a smaller scale on this site. Cast the claim (the thesis, the argument, the idea, whatever) in strange and imagery-laden enough terms, cant it in analogy and punning and so on, and eventually it becomes impossible to understand, and people stop trying.

The audience is only human.

And humans are varied and while some or many may dismiss it or ignore it, others or a few might actually find something much more in it. So while you ignore it or don't get it or don't think it's worthwhile, other guys like Ebert actually love the shit out of the Jodonizer's films (while also being weirded the hell out) and put something like El Topo on their great movies list. It's what being human is all about, and what may be weird to you - because of your own context which give you your conceptions and likes and dislikes and other fancies - may not be weird to others who are from entirely different environs. Or it might still be weird to them, but because they are different, their reaction to the weird will be entirely different. It's the antithesis of human homogeneity. It's heterogeneous imagination where one concept, one way, one man or one group's say is not the end all be all. It's no longer "if this is not industrialized like the way I prefer, it is blah".

And, from where I'm coming from, some guy making something that can't even be understood by others isn't a bad thing. Sure it won't gross in the box office, sure most people or all people won't like it. But achieving a truly incomprehensible thing is an achievement in itself, and kudos to the imagination that made it up. Because, yeah, like what's been pointed out before, most human attempts at the incomprehensible are still comprehensible because the imaginations that thought it up are still human. So if that is surpassed and you go into scary really trippy shit, well... then... yay!

We should do this because the audience is human. Are there limits to this being human? What is being human? Is there only one way to it? Are there many different ways of being human? Let's find out! There is no only!

[jollyreaper]

I object to Trek for a couple reasons.

In real life, risks are understood. Why is it bad to be underwater without breathing? We will drown. We don't see one week we worry about being under for a minute and the next week 30 minutes is no big deal. If it is clear that I am at risk when a man holds a pistol on me, next week I don't shrug off a shotgun blast. In Trek all of these things are arbitrary and based on the needs of the plot. This is usually an issue for scifi and fantasy with made up magic and tech.

There's also the idiot ball. When someone does something dumb for the sale of the plot, that's terrible writing. The cop didn't call in his location before investigating the trouble? The group bein hunted by an axe murderer splits up so they can be killed more efficiently. The police chief has a rage-on against his best cop who is also a maverick who plays by his own rules. There's a mixture of cliche and stupidity that's old because we've seen it all before.

Realistic mistakes are another matter. The tragic oversight, the hubris that sets a great man up for a fall, that all makes for good tragedy and it's not out of character.

[Enigma]

Another Hive Fleet question. What form of FTL do the HF uses? I've heard of a Narval but that for of FTL seems mighty slow. Do they also use the warp? How?